Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (13 page)

BIKERS WEREN’T REGULAR VISITORS to the Lodge. Betty, a small woman with bright, cheerful eyes, explained that most of her customers were adventurers who came up the road on foot - the lodge had become a sort of base camp for people preparing to climb Mount Wilhelm. Over a breakfast of good, hot porridge Betty told us that in all the time she had been living there, we were the first motorcyclists she’d seen. Perhaps it might be the start of a whole new line of business.

Daniel had been brilliant. He had organised this route through the mountains, an adventure as much for him and his mates as it was for us. With all our doubts about the Bundi Track, it really did feel like we were heading into the unknown. Emmanuel had not made it through, which was a problem because Sam and Robin had planned to return to Madang with him in his truck, while Claudio and I carried on with the bikes.

We’d made contact with Emmanuel through Nancy Sullivan, a woman we’d been in touch with before we left London. An artist from New York, Nancy came out to PNG after the stock market crash in 1987. She runs a private consultancy working in what she calls ‘applied anthropology’, which basically means she teaches New Guineans to study their own people, instead of someone coming in from England or America to do it. Nancy was a mine of information on what we might accomplish here in Papua.

Anyway, the pertinent factor right then was the road. Emmanuel had only got as far as a village on the other side of the mountains and Sam and Robin had no alternative but to go back the way we had come - all the way to Goroka - then take another route that skirted the eastern highlands to the Lae/Madang highway. It was agreed that we’d meet up again at Bundi Junction and hopefully by then we would have come across Emmanuel.

After the short ride the previous afternoon I was really up for it. This should be an amazing day. It would also be our last day on motorbikes for a while and I was determined to make the most of it. I had a feeling it would be tough, but I had faith in my ability and in Claudio’s too. He was his usual phlegmatic self, of course - if he fell off, he fell off, and whatever hazards and obstacles we faced, we faced. But then this was the guy who had spent six months secretly filming across the border.

Leaving the lodge, we re-crossed the bridge over the creek and pulled wheelies all the way down an overgrown airstrip. We had to negotiate a series of steep climbs and descents. The going was slow, the track really narrow and very rocky to begin with, lots of big stones and loose shale, easy to get a puncture or even buckle a wheel rim.

Gradually, though, the terrain changed, and the big rocks were replaced by soft, sandy mud and potholes. We climbed out of the jungle briefly and rounding a sharp bend skidded to a halt. The road ahead was blocked by a pile of tree branches. Five barefoot men with machetes stood in front of it, their ringleader a little bearded guy in a cap. He scowled at us, shifting the machete from one hand to the other. According to Daniel, these were local villagers, paid by the government to keep the road clear and open. Apparently they also liked to create roadblocks, stopping cars to demand money from the occupants. Last night Betty had told us that every time she goes down to Goroka she gets hit for anything between 6 and 150 kina.

These guys wanted $50 to let us through. ‘We fix the road,’ the bearded guy kept saying, ‘we fix the road.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I surprised myself by piping up right away. ‘When did you fix the road . . . today?’

He nodded.

‘Where? Where did you fix it?’

He gestured across the valley with his machete.

‘No, you didn’t.’ I was shaking my head. ‘You know what? I think you heard us coming and quickly blocked the road. That’s not a land slip, it’s a bunch of sticks. You just want to make a fast buck for doing nothing, don’t you?’

Suddenly Luke, one of the guys riding with us, was right up in the bearded guy’s face. With his helmet, goggles and body armour, he looked and sounded menacing. Luke was an Australian living in Lae and was fluent in the national language. Ignoring the machete, he was gesticulating angrily and telling the guy exactly what he thought of him. He told him they had been paid to keep the road open but nobody had been able to get through in over a year, so what the hell did he think he was doing demanding money from us? He really was animated, yelling at the guy that he could whistle for his fifty bucks. If they didn’t shift the roadblock, then we would.

For a moment I wondered if it would all kick off. These guys had weapons, but in our body armour and helmets we looked like a bunch of stormtroopers from
Star Wars
. The bearded guy’s mates didn’t seem to have much stomach for a fight, though. Two of them were no more than teenagers and seemed more interested in waving to the camera. Luke was still going for it and the bearded guy was looking more and more bewildered. In the end he muttered something to the younger guys and the road was cleared.

Engines snarling, we covered them in a cloud of dust and sped off down the road - we hadn’t given them a penny. I thought about what would have happened if it had been a car coming along with one or two people in it. What choice would they have had when confronted by men with machetes? I thought about poor Betty, a woman on her own, robbed every time she tried to go down the mountain.

Oh well, we were through now and the road was gnarly enough that I had to give it all my concentration. When I say it was gnarly, of course I mean that it was delicious. It was beautiful! Everything you want on a dirt bike - steep and slippery, dusty and dry and yet damp and muddy in places too.

We climbed hill after hill and every time we stopped for a breather Daniel told me that Bundi Junction was just over the next rise. By lunchtime we had crossed plenty of ‘next rises’, however, and I reckoned we were only halfway. Stopping in a village, we bought some passion fruit and tried to decide what to do about one of the bikes that had broken down. It was remote up here and we knew that no trucks could get through. Then we spotted a green Toyota pick-up driven by a heavy-set guy with a braid in his beard and a beanie hat . . . Emmanuel! This village was as far as he had got. He told us we could load the bike on his truck and he would get it to Bundi Junction.

I wasn’t quite sure how he was going to do that - the Toyota already had six or eight guys in the back. But Emmanuel said there was more than enough room for one little motorbike and between us we got it loaded and somehow found room for the rider too. Emmanuel told us he made the trip at least this far once a week and there was nothing to worry us between here and the junction.

By this point quite a crowd had gathered, and we’d been chatting to some of the locals. There were one or two piglets running about - cute little things, with speckled backs and delicate-looking hooves. We already knew how much people prized them - I’d seen a woman with a piglet on a lead yesterday, it squealed its heart out when I picked it up. We had also heard that if a mother pig didn’t suckle for whatever reason, it wasn’t uncommon for a woman to suckle the piglet instead. Mind you, we had also heard all sorts of other stuff - head hunters, cannibals, initiation ceremonies where men apparently cut elephant’s ears in their foreskins . . . I was sure most of it was rubbish, so this tale about piglets and women had to be pretty tall, I reckoned. But chatting to the locals, we came across a young woman with a child on her shoulders, chewing at an ear of corn. She told us that she had suckled a pig. Daniel asked her what she meant exactly. She just smiled and shrugged.

‘The mother wouldn’t let the baby to her teat,’ she said, ‘so I give him my teat instead.’

I had never heard of anything like it, but there she was and why would anyone lie about something like that?

‘Ah, what’s the big deal?’ Daniel slapped me on the shoulder. ‘In England you guys share your organs with pigs.’

‘No, I think that was South Africa,’ I told him.

We rode on and on. We crossed rivers on wooden bridges and climbed steep-sided hills where the land slipped away and the drop was sheer for hundreds of feet. We came to a bridge where there were no boards, just open ironwork and a river raging below. Walking out over the metal grid, I gazed down at the rapids, wondering how we were going to make it across. But then I noticed there were two narrow iron rails that ran to the other side. The gap between them was just enough for the bike tyres to sit in and I figured that one at a time, perhaps, we could wheel them across.

That’s exactly what we did, and twenty minutes later we were riding through elephant grass that drifted in great waves across the road. It was tough going, up on the pegs, down on the seat - lots of back brake and throttle. Riding off road is all about momentum: if you keep that going you’re fine; slow down too much, you lose grip and you’re screwed.

We climbed another mountain, slithering down the other side in a switchback of savage twists and turns. We forded shallow rivers and passed beneath a wild waterfall. Whenever I could I popped the front wheel. Emmanuel was still right behind us in the truck and so far he had negotiated the road with no real drama. There had been the odd land slip, and we met three guys with an axe and shovel between them, who really had been mending the road.

But not far from Bundi Junction, we had to stop at another bridge where there were no boards. We walked the bikes across as we had before. Then the truck tried to make it. Emmanuel eased the Toyota onto the rails in first gear, his head bobbing at the open window. It all seemed to be going fine, until all of a sudden the wheels slipped and the back end slumped, shifting so hard it dislodged a crosswise section completely. Claudio and I were already on the other side. I saw Emmanuel blanch as, for a nanosecond, the truck just seemed to hang there. Then he floored it, stamped on the throttle and the wheels span, caught the crosspiece and somehow he got enough purchase to make it the rest of the way.

‘No problem,’ he said breezily as he got out and inspected the damage to the bridge. ‘No problem at all . . . truck’s all right, bike in the back is all right. No problem.’

I could tell by the look in his eye, though, that for a moment there he thought he was going down.

 

 

By the time we finally crested the last hill I was pretty weary. It had been a great ride, with loads of memorable moments. One gully in particular was surreal and beautiful, with massive swarms of butterflies flying against my goggles as I rode. But still, it was a relief finally to see Sam and Robin waiting for us, delighted that we had met up with Emmanuel and made it unscathed. Sam took me to one side and told me that he and Robin had had their own little drama as well.

‘We were in this village,’ he said, ‘somewhere on the Rumu Pass, and we got a flat tyre. It was all right, we had a spare and I changed the wheel while Robin filmed it.’

‘What happened?’

‘Well, nothing to begin with. We had a few people watching but then from down the hill this guy starts yelling about the camera. He came up the hill, shouting and screaming about the bloody camera. He was a little drunk I think, and he was swinging this big iron bar. He told us to turn off the camera, to stop filming or he’d smash up the truck and us along with it.’

‘So what did you do?’ I was remembering Luke getting in the machete man’s face.

‘The only thing we could do,’ Sam said. ‘Stopped filming, got in the truck and high-tailed it out of there.’

 

 

We said our goodbyes to Daniel and the other guys in the rain. In the true spirit of
By Any Means
, it had followed us right across the mountains and was really hosing down. I was soaking and there was no chance of getting dry because the only space in Emmanuel’s truck was the bit of flatbed the broken-down bike had occupied.

A couple of hours later, wet but happy, we rolled into Madang and pulled up outside a large house next to a construction site. We were greeted by Nancy Sullivan, an energetic-looking blonde woman wearing a print dress and carrying her young son on her hip. He was around five years old - an adopted Papuan boy - and wearing sunglasses with Elvis sideburns attached to them.

‘Hey, boys,’ Nancy said, ‘great to see you.’ She was all smiles. ‘Come on in and make yourselves at home. There’s food, and beer in the fridge. There’s even a gin and tonic if you fancy one.’

Nancy, who had been such a help to us when we’d been preparing for this leg of the trip, was putting us up for a couple of nights. The house was spacious, with the living area on the upper floors and the balcony enclosed with mosquito netting so we could get some air without being bitten to death. Gratefully I accepted a G&T and slumped down in a chair. Nancy told us that tomorrow was the Queen’s birthday and although that was taken seriously here in PNG, she didn’t think much would be happening in Madang. But the day after that, she had arranged a river trip - we were heading up the Sepik River from Bogia to Gapun, a tiny community of thirty houses where a linguistic anthropologist called Don Kulick was conducting a study.

There was, however, a potential fly in the ointment. Earlier that evening Nancy had received a text from the guy who owned the boat we would travel in, Milson. He told her he had been shot at by bandits and was no longer sure he was coming. My thoughts immediately turned to head hunters and cannibals, but Nancy assured us that Milson would show up at some point and all would be fine.

‘The guy was shot at, Nancy!’ I said. ‘I’m not sure
I
would turn up if someone shot at me.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ She flapped a hand at me. ‘It happens all the time. He wasn’t hurt and he’ll be here, so there is no need to worry.’

Security is a major issue in Papua New Guinea, particularly in the towns. Nancy told us that there were lots of ‘settlers’ in Madang - people from the highlands who had come down to look for work. But there was no work. There
were
lots of properties to break into, though. The police were pretty ineffective, so people paid private security firms to patrol the streets. It was big business.